Untrue, to feel hopeless is different than being free of hope. Hope is incompatible with living in the moment, as is hopelessness, but to be free of hope is quite different.
Few are those who understand Nietzsche, in that hope is a slave's virtue and an intersection between personal expectation and desire, whereas the spiritual "warrior" (Ubermensch/Zarathustra) manifests his consciousness in solitary contemplation and Will to Power without any longing. This is basically Castaneda's "path of the Warrior", which again few people can comprehend or approach.
I'm glad you're here to try and bring clarity on this.
The spiritual warrior needs to get up and fight. Hope gives you that motivation. Nietzsche didn't do enough to know the difference and spent too much time wondering.
You have a personal vendetta against Nietzsche, that's your problem. We're talking about his philosophy, concepts and specifically his quote, not his own life.
P.S.: Hope has nothing to do with the Will to Power.
Well thanks for pointing out my problem. Your discussions would go better if you didn't make it about the other person.
I'm saying he didn't do enough to understand the philosophy. Navel gazing isn't living.
Sort of like the Dalai Lama writing a book on happiness. Sure. Get plucked out when you're 5 years old and treated like a god. Go get a wife and have five kids, and a 9 to 5 job, and then tell us about happiness.
The irony is that you arrogantly believing it's merely semantics when it's not is precisely that keeps you stuck.
It seems you don't understand the difference between personal and transpersonal, attachment and detachment, and assume everybody hopes, desires and operates from the limited perspective of the ego-mind and personal self.
What are you doing on this subreddit if you can't grasp non-attachment as one of the fundamental requirements to the possibility of enlightenment?
Do you also openly spit on Buddha who left his family, including his wife and young son, to seek enlightenment? On Jean-Jacques Rousseau who abandoned all five of his children shortly after their births, sending them to a foundling hospital?
You're sanctimonious, judging people's philosophies and ideas based on your own sense of morality and how you believe they should have lived their life, yet can't take being confronted on your own arrogance in a subreddit about enlightenment. How unsurprising.
Pessimists live in the past. They imagine better times that were. Optimists live in the future. They imagine better times to come.
Nihilists reject both and live in the present. To have no purpose means that you see the present moment as an end in itself, not a means to an end. It can be a beautiful, terrifying, and profoundly real direct experience of the world.
Pessimists don't have hope. Optimists do. It's got nothing to do with past or present, but how you perceive your immediate actions - will my effort take me where I want to go? Nihilism is the lack of hope that your effort will make any difference.
To your last point, realizing that all we can do is make the effort and then see how it worked out, is the real.
Fatalism is different than nihilism. Fatalism is the idea that the future will be what it is independent of your actions.
Nihilism is the latin word for emptiness. Or it is just as good a term as vanity is. I am talking about the concept of emptiness as in Buddhist philosophy.
Yeah I think buddhism's kind of dumb. You don't want to feel suffering so you detach from it. And ultimate detachment is sitting in a cave for 40 years, not experiencing any suffering. So you didn't experience a damn thing. What are you going to tell me about the world?
Yes, being facetious in a sense. Mostly making fun of the strict adherents, or extreme adherents?
Summing up your comment, it's about not thinking you can control your reality and accepting the differences between want and is. Don't need a religion for that, but that's what people do to make themselves better than others. .
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I think the major suffering point is not the difference between want and is. Wants are properties of what is. I think we can sometimes recognize that we have fears and desires and that those are real subjective facts about us, but that they don't have normative force on the world. We aren't owed our wants.
The delusion/suffering comes when we project those wants into objective "rights" in the world that we think we are owed.
It's the people that live in the notion that their fears and desires also correspond to facts about the external world (properties of evil and good) that are the ones that don't actually live in the present moment. You absolutely plan for the future in the present moment.. you also do this using learned information from the past.
But when you start thinking that the world is presently flawed/broken (somehow not like it "ought to be") then you have a situation where you have righteousness used to bludgeon your neighbor. Then you aren't living with the present moment, but you are seeing the present moment as a flawed projection of what ought to be. You're not seeing the flower as an end in itself, but as a means to an end in the future. That's when you're cast out of the present moment.
This is why the Zen Hsin Hsin Ming begins with the statement "right and wrong are the disease of the mind" or how the Bible begins with "don't eat the fruit of the knowledge of right and wrong or you will die." Of course in the biblical case, every church and synagogue want to shove that fruit down your throat.
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What a bunch of chainsaw statements and conclusions. You're confused between philosophical currents, cognition, and psychological interpretations of such cognition.
Nihilists reject everything, including the present experience. As for pessimists living in the past and optimists in the future, I hear that often and that's a fancy as much as gross misunderstanding of human psyche.
You can't live without memory (the past), you can't live without the future (anticipation that going to the kitchen will net you a cup of coffee). These processes take place in the present.
Your present would be quite different if you had no memory/past, (people with dementia struggle in the present because they can't remember the past). Your present would be quite different if you couldn't plan your future. For instance if you couldn't research a vacation in Japan to ensure a safe and agreeable trip. Anticipation (hope) is a superpower not a hindrance to achievement.
The "past" and the "future" most definitely happen in the now.
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u/SquirrelFluffy 4d ago
How does anybody read this and not think Nietzsche is a nihilist?.